


you filled my lungs with summer

by piperreynas



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Francophobia, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pre-Canon, a plague in florence?? maybe?, long sentences...maybe too long, vague discussions of historical events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25682068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piperreynas/pseuds/piperreynas
Summary: "here is a secret: nicky has told exactly one mortal about what they are. " | or: three scenes from a marriage
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 9
Kudos: 179





	you filled my lungs with summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainbowagnes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/gifts).



here is a secret: nicky has told exactly one mortal about what they are.

he cracks somewhere around the sixteenth century, during one plague or another. he couldn’t say why exactly; maybe he’d been bored, had wanted to see what would’ve happened if word had gotten around. maybe the prospect of another four hundred years wandering through towns ravaged by war and disease unable to enact any substantial change had daunted him. or perhaps, far more likely, he had looked at yusuf, sketching in some sunlit field or laughing himself sick at a six year old’s poorly crafted joke, and, fit to bursting with (literally endless) joy, had been briefly consumed with the urge to pass some of it on before he died of happiness.

the woman he tells is young, one foot in the grave already; she can barely hold enough breath in her lungs to carry a conversation with him, so he doesn’t worry that she will tell anyone else. frankly, it’s a wonder she believes him at all--the plague made many cynical, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on her; the pain of losing her mother, then her three siblings in quick succession had made her hungry for any semblance of hope or happiness.

and so he told her of yusuf. “i’ve known him for four hundred and twenty nine years now,” he said, could’ve told her down to the minute if she’d asked because he’d never stopped counting, watching awestruck and lovesick as the number climbed higher and higher, with no sign of stopping. this was one of the many gifts yusuf had given him: the ability to count God’s blessings.

“so many years,” she’d whispered in awe, voice breaking, “and you’ve not grown tired of him?”

nicky had laughed, wiping her brow with a cool cloth. “you’ve met him,” he said, because she had. yusuf, emboldened by his immortality and the knowledge that, with half the country in the grave and the other slowly making its way there, there was nothing he could do to make it worse, visited every hour, andy following with her usual exasperated fondness, to argue with the old men and charm the old women and play with the children.

“i have,” she said warmly, watching yusuf flounce in holding a bouquet of wildflowers, no doubt to present to some blushing young maid. yusuf turned and winked then, and she’d laughed weakly, saying “i imagine you won’t ever get tired of him,” and raising a brow at the way nicky’s face flushed beet red all at once.

nicky had smiled almost painfully wide. “i should hope not,” he said, watching yusuf’s eyes crinkle at the corners as a little girl reached out with trembling, too-thin fingers to tuck a dandelion behind one of his ears.

the woman died a week later; they were all long gone by then.

.

here is a fact: joe romanticizes everything.

they spent a few months in year seven hundred and ninety one winding their way through paris in the wake of baron haussman’s reconstruction. nicky’s part in their travels was mostly to watch as yusuf composed sonnets about a child’s laugh and the warmth of a particularly shapely loaf of bread, or stopped to sketch a fallen leaf that he felt looked “particularly forlorn...doesn’t it look like it’s waiting for something nicky?” and hum when yusuf felt he’d made a particularly good point. (which isn’t to say that yusuf was not making good points, but rather that nicky after some point was too overcome by the beauty of yusuf’s entire being to comprehend speech, much less attempt to replicate it himself. despite his incoherency (or perhaps because of it), nicky thought yusuf understood anyway. he always had.)

andy tired of watching the two of them more quickly than usual and had taken booker away within five weeks of their arrival in favor of attempting to prevent what would become the first boer war. it was not until after they’d left that nicky understood the true purpose of their visit; they weren’t there to trawl through museums or break into palaces but rather to laugh at all the parisians as they bemoaned the loss of a beloved pub or an old cafe.

perhaps the only thing that yusuf hated more than nihilism was the french. nicky watched from a corner as one man cursed loudly at a worker attempting to move a streetlamp, brandishing a baguette as though it were a sword, and thought that maybe he understood.

in between cackling, yusuf interjected with curses of his own in both parisian french and the strange mix of genovese-tinged old moroccan arabic that only nicky could decipher easily, cruder than usual but no less delightful. when the man turned his baguette on them, nicky dissolved into laughter too. “you are _awful_ ,” he said, which of course meant, “i’ve never loved anyone in my life as much as i love you.”

.

here is a dream nicky once had: an endless field of lush green grass. under the shade of a particularly large oak (or perhaps a weeping willow): nicky leaning against the trunk with joe spread out in his lap, made pliant by the warm weather and (he dared to hope) by his proximity to nicky, carefully eating orange segments that nicky fed to him one by one and smiling when the breeze tousled his hair.

they had been travelling across the sahara, just to see if they could; save for each other, they had been completely and utterly alone, and despite the cold at night and the scorpions that tried to bite him in the mornings and the way that they kept dying of dehydration every three days, he found he didn’t mind it.

or well, he usually didn’t mind it. he woke from the dream to see yusuf sleeping across from him, mouth open in sleep, his hair an unholy mess and sighed, pressing his hand against his sternum to stave off the ache (which by then felt everpresent) and counting the days until they reached a city.

(some five hundred years later, nicky will core and slice an apple into eight segments with one of yusuf’s favorite knives in the walled courtyard of a villa bordering one of italy’s oldest vineyards. yusuf, forever impatient, will not wait to be fed and will instead take the knife from nicky’s hands to use as a fork while nicky laughs, at once annoyed and indulgent. it won't be as pretty as the dream, but it will be real; nicky wouldn't trade it for a thing.)

**Author's Note:**

> \-- my timeline here is admittedly a little fuzzy; i didn't look at any wikis while writing this so this probably isn't canon but in my mind joe and nicky were 30/31 when they met and it took them two years to get together  
> \-- would've LOVED to write from yusuf's pov but this fic is just massive amounts of projection about how much i love yusuf's character so. maybe later?  
> \-- the "count your blessings" line is a reference to the fact that yusuf prlly taught nicky how to read and do math  
> \-- to clarify setting for the first two vignettes: one takes place in florence; according to an nih study there were numerous "epidemics" in florence throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, although of what i'm not quite sure; two takes place in post-haussman france in early 1880--haussman was fired in 1870, but some of his projects were executed well into the next century. im not sure if streetlamps were part of the rest of said projects in '80 too but oh well! and three is just some nebulous past (and also some nebulous future in 1700 or thereabouts)  
> \-- strongly believe that yusuf hates the french; this is definitely part of why he's the hardest on booker at the end. you cannot convince me otherwise.  
> \-- title comes from sarah murphy's "letter to the past after long silence"  
> \-- ty to margot for being awesome!! loaf u


End file.
